Amusing Monday: Water music from a garden

I was thinking today that I wanted to find some kind of unusual
water-related music, since I haven’t featured music in Amusing
Monday for quite sometime.

As coincidence would have it, the program “Living on Earth” this
week featured a recording of a Japanese instrument called
suikinkutsu. The recording was made by anthropologist and
ethnomusicologist Steven Feld.

I was fortunate to find a video on YouTube that not only
describes how the sound is made but also shows how the instrument
is created in a Japanese garden. It turns out that just about
anyone can get this unusual sound with a ceramic jar placed in a
water basin, but I can’t help but prefer the elaborate effort it
takes to create the sound of water in a garden setting.

From the liner notes of Feld’s album “Suikinkutsu” comes this
description of the instrument:

“Suikinkutsu literally “water-zither-cave,” is a unique
instrument associated with washing for the Japanese tea ceremony.
Water drips from a chozubachi stone basin into a partly-filled
underground ceramic bowl. The dripping sound, resembling a
kotozither, projects up through bamboo tubes into a garden, where
water may symbolize spirit, purification, solace, and
reflection.

“Dating to the mid 17th century Edo period, the name
suikinkutsuis often
credited to the famous tea ceremony teacher Kobori Enshu. After a
decline, the instrument re-emerged in the Meiji Era of the late
19th and early 20th centuries, with renewed recent popularity.”